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American avant-garde composer From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
La Monte Thornton Young (born October 14, 1935) is an American composer, musician, and performance artist recognized as one of the first American minimalist composers and a central figure in Fluxus and post-war avant-garde music.[1][2][3] He is best known for his exploration of sustained tones, beginning with his 1958 composition Trio for Strings.[4] His compositions have called into question the nature and definition of music, most prominently in the text scores of his Compositions 1960.[5] While few of his recordings remain in print, his work has inspired prominent musicians across various genres, including avant-garde, rock, and ambient music.[6]
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Young in c. 1961 | |
| Born | October 14, 1935 Bern, Idaho, U.S. |
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Young played jazz saxophone and studied composition in California during the 1950s, and subsequently moved to New York in 1960, where he was a central figure in the downtown music and Fluxus art scenes.[5] He then became known for his pioneering work in drone music (originally called dream music) with his Theatre of Eternal Music collective, alongside collaborators such as Tony Conrad, John Cale, and his wife, the multimedia artist Marian Zazeela.
Since 1962, he has worked extensively with Zazeela, with whom he developed the Dream House sound and light environment.[3] In 1964, he began work on his unfinished improvisatory composition The Well-Tuned Piano, iterations of which he has performed throughout subsequent decades.[7] Beginning in 1970, he and Zazeela studied under Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath. In 2002, Young and Zazeela formed the Just Alap Raga Ensemble with their disciple Jung Hee Choi.
Young was born in a log cabin in Bern, Idaho.[8][9] As a child he was influenced by the droning sounds of the environment, such as blowing wind and electrical transformers.[10] During his childhood, Young's family moved several times before settling in Los Angeles, as his father searched for work. He was raised as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.[10] He graduated from John Marshall High School.[9] Young began his music studies at Los Angeles City College, and transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA),[11] where he received a BA in 1958.[8][9] In the jazz milieu of Los Angeles, Young played with notable musicians including Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, Billy Higgins, and Eric Dolphy.[12] He undertook additional studies at the University of California, Berkeley from 1958 to 1960.[9] In 1959 he attended the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music under Karlheinz Stockhausen, and in 1960 relocated to New York in order to study electronic music with Richard Maxfield at the New School for Social Research. His compositions during this period were influenced by Anton Webern, Gregorian chant, Indian classical music, Japanese Gagaku, and Indonesian gamelan music.[13]
A number of Young's early works use the twelve-tone technique, which he studied under Leonard Stein at Los Angeles City College. (Stein had served as an assistant to Arnold Schoenberg when Schoenberg, the inventor of the twelve-tone method, taught at UCLA.)[14] Young also studied composition with Robert Stevenson at UCLA and with Seymore Shifrin at UC Berkeley. In 1958, he developed the Trio for Strings, originally scored for violin, viola, and cello, and which presaged his later work. The Trio for Strings has been described as an "origin point for minimalism."[15] When Young visited Darmstadt in 1959, he encountered the music and writings of John Cage. There he also met Cage's collaborator, pianist David Tudor, who subsequently would première some of Young's works. At Tudor's suggestion, Young engaged in a correspondence with Cage. Within a few months, Young was presenting some of Cage's music on the West Coast. In turn, Cage and Tudor included some of Young's works in performances throughout the U.S. and Europe. Influenced by Cage, Young at this time took a turn toward the conceptual, using principles of indeterminacy in his compositions and incorporating non-traditional sounds, noises, and actions.[16]
Young moved to Downtown New York City in 1960. In the Spring of 1961 he developed an artistic relationship with Fluxus founder George Maciunas at the electronic music course of Richard Maxfield at The New School.[17] Maciunas would go on to design the book An Anthology of Chance Operations, an artist's book publication from the early 1960s, featuring experimental neodada art and music composition that used John Cage–inspired indeterminacy. It was edited by Young and DIY co-published in 1963 by Young and Jackson Mac Low. A few months earlier, in December 1960, Young had curated and organized a series of concert-performances by members of the nascent Fluxus movement at the top floor loft of Yoko Ono at 112 Chambers Street involving visual artists, musicians, dancers and composers — mixing music, visual art and performance together. It was attended by John Cage, Peggy Guggenheim, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp, among others art world luminaries.[18]
During this period, Young created short, haiku-like, conceptual art but dreamlike scores-texts that have become associated with Fluxus. For example, Young's Compositions 1960 includes a number of unusual actions: some of them un-performable, and constituted an early form of poetic conceptual and post-conceptual art. Most examine a certain presupposition about the nature of music and art by carrying absurd Dada-like concepts to an extreme. One, Composition 1960 #10 to Bob Morris instructs: "draw a straight line and follow it" (a directive which Young has said has guided his life and work since).[19] Another instructs the performer to build a fire. Another states that "this piece is a little whirlpool out in the middle of the ocean." Another says the performer should release a butterfly into the room. Yet another challenges the performer to push a piano through a wall. Composition 1960 #7 proved especially pertinent to his future endeavors: it consisted of a B, an F#, a perfect fifth, and the instruction: "To be held for a long time."[20]
In 1962, based on his dream chord, Young wrote The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer. One of The Four Dreams of China, the piece is based on four pitches, which he later gave as the frequency ratios: 36-35-32-24 (G, C, +C#, D), and limits as to which may be combined with any other.[21] Most of his pieces after this point are based on select pitches, played continuously, and a group of long held pitches to be improvised upon. For The Four Dreams of China Young began to plan Dream House, a light and sound installation conceived as a dream chord "work that would be played continuously and ultimately exist as a 'living organism with a life and tradition of its own,'" where musicians would live and create music twenty-four hours a day.[22] He formed the music collective Theatre of Eternal Music to realize Dream House and other pieces.[23] The group initially included calligrapher and light artist Marian Zazeela (who married Young in 1963), Angus MacLise, and Billy Name.[3] In 1964 the ensemble comprised Young and Zazeela, John Cale and Tony Conrad (a former Harvard mathematics major), and sometimes Terry Riley (voices). Since 1966 the group has seen many permutations and has included Garrett List, Jon Hassell, Alex Dea, and many others, including members of Young's 60s groups.[24]
On September 25, 1965, the Fluxus FluxOrchestra was conducted by Young at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York City, with a program, designed by George Maciunas, folded into paper airplanes and launched during the evening into the audience.
Young and Zazeela's first continuous electronic sound environment was created in their loft on Church Street, New York City, in September 1966 with sine wave generators and light sources designed to produce a continuous installation of floating sculptures and color sources, and a series of slides entitled Ornamental Lightyears Tracery. This Dream House environment was maintained almost continuously from September 1966 to January 1970, being turned off only to listen to "other music" and to study the contrast between extended periods in it and periods of silence. Young and Zazeela worked, sang and lived in it and studied the effects on themselves and visitors. Performances were often extreme in length, conceived by Young as having no beginning and no end, existing before and after any particular performance. In their daily lives, too, Young and Zazeela practiced an artificial sleep–wake cycle—with "days" longer than twenty-four hours.[25]
As of 1970, Young's interests in the music of Asia and his wish to find precedents for the intervals he was using in his minimalist work led him to Indian spiritualist and musician Shyam Batnager who introduced Young to the recordings of pandit Pran Nath, whose name means Lord of the life-breath in Sanskrit.[26] Impressed, Young would go on to meet and study and perform with Pran Nath for the rest of Pran Nath's life[27] through the partial support of the Dia Art Foundation. Fellow students of Pran Nath, included Zazeela, Terry Riley, Rhys Chatham, Jon Hassell, Simone Forti, Shabda Kahn, Jon Gibson, Michael Harrison, Yoshi Wada, Don Cherry, Henry Flynt, Lee Konitz, Charlemagne Palestine and Catherine Christer Hennix.[28]
Young considers The Well-Tuned Piano—a permutating composition of themes and improvisations for just-intoned solo piano—to be his masterpiece. Young gave the world premiere of The Well-Tuned Piano in Rome in 1974, ten years after the creation of the piece. Previously, he had presented it as a recorded work. In 1975, Young premiered the work in New York, with eleven live performances during the months of April and May. As of October 25, 1981, the date of the Gramavision recording of The Well-Tuned Piano, Young had performed the piece 55 times.[29] In 1987, Young performed the piece again as part of a larger concert series that included many more of his works.[30] This performance, on May 10, 1987, was videotaped and released on DVD in 2000 on Young's label, Just Dreams.[31] Performances have exceeded six hours in length, and so far have only been documented several times. The Well-Tuned Piano is strongly influenced by mathematical composition as well as Hindustani classical music practice.[32]
Since the 1970s, Young and Zazeela have realized a long series of semi-permanent Dream House installations, which combine Young's just-intoned sine waves in elaborate, symmetrical configurations with Zazeela's quasi-calligraphic light sculptures.[33] In July 1970 a model short-term Dream House was displayed to the public at the gallery Friedrich & Dahlem in Munich, Germany. Later, model Dream House environments were presented in various locations in Europe and the United States. In 1974, the two released Dream House 78' 17". From January through April 19, 2009, Dream House was installed in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York as part of The Third Mind exhibition. A Dream House installation exists today at the MELA Foundation on 275 Church Street, New York, above the couple's loft, and is open to the public.[34]
In 2002, Young, with Zazeela and senior disciple Jung Hee Choi, founded the Just Alap Raga Ensemble. This ensemble, performing Indian classical music of the Kirana gharana, merges the traditions of Western and Hindustani classical music, with Young applying his own compositional approach to traditional raga performance, form, and technique.[35]
Young's first musical influence came in early childhood in Bern. He relates that "the very first sound that I recall hearing was the sound of wind blowing under the eaves and around the log extensions at the corners of the log cabin". Continuous sounds—human-made as well as natural—fascinated him as a child. He described himself as fascinated from a young age by droning sounds, such as "the sound of the wind blowing", the "60 cycle per second drone [of] step-down transformers on telephone poles", the tanpura drone and the alap of Indian classical music, "certain static aspects of serialism, as in the Webern slow movement of the Symphony Opus 21", and Japanese gagaku "which has sustained tones in it in the instruments such as the Sho".[36] The four pitches he later named the "Dream chord", on which he based many of his mature works, came from his early age appreciation of the continuous sound made by the telephone poles in Bern.[37]
Jazz is one of his main influences; prior to 1956, he planned to devote his career to it.[38] At first, Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh influenced his alto saxophone playing style, and later John Coltrane shaped Young's use of the sopranino saxophone. Jazz was, together with Indian music, an important influence on the use of improvisation in his works post-1962.[38] Young discovered Indian music in 1957 on the campus of UCLA. He cites Ali Akbar Khan (sarod) and Chatur Lal (tabla) as particularly significant. The discovery of the tanpura, which he learned to play with Pandit Pran Nath, was a decisive influence in his interest in long-sustained sounds. Young also acknowledges the influence of Japanese music, especially Gagaku, and Pygmy music.[39][40]
Young discovered classical music relatively late in life, thanks to his teachers at university. He cites Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Pérotin, Léonin, Claude Debussy and Organum musical style as important influences.[39] The serialism of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern had the greatest impact.[39]
Young was also keen to pursue his musical endeavors with the help of psychedelics. Cannabis, LSD and peyote played an important part in Young's life from mid-1950s onwards, when he was introduced to them by Terry Jennings and Billy Higgins. He said that "everybody [he] knew and worked with was very much into drugs as a creative tool as well as a consciousness-expanding tool". This was the case with the musicians of the Theatre of Eternal Music, with whom he "got high for every concert: the whole group".[41] He considers that the cannabis experience helped him open up to where he went with Trio for Strings, though sometimes it proved a disadvantage when performing anything which required keeping track of the number of elapsed bars. He commented on the subject:
These tools can be used to your advantage if you're a master of [them]... If used wisely—the correct tool for the correct job—they can play an important role... It allows you to go within yourself and focus on certain frequency relationships and memory relationships in a very, very interesting way.[42]
Young's use of long tones and exceptionally high volume has been extremely influential within Young's group of associates: Tony Conrad, Jon Hassell, Rhys Chatham, Michael Harrison, Henry Flynt, Ben Neill, Charles Curtis, and Catherine Christer Hennix. It has also been notably influential on John Cale's contribution to The Velvet Underground's sound; Cale has been quoted as saying "LaMonte [Young] was perhaps the best part of my education and my introduction to musical discipline."[43] His work has inspired prominent musicians across various genres, including fellow minimalist composer Terry Riley, experimental rock groups the Velvet Underground and Sonic Youth, and ambient music pioneer Brian Eno.[6] Eno calls him "the daddy of us all".[2] In 1981, Eno referred to X for Henry Flynt by saying, "It really is a cornerstone of everything I've done since."[44]
Andy Warhol attended the 1962 première of the static composition by La Monte Young called Trio for Strings. Uwe Husslein cites film-maker Jonas Mekas, who accompanied Warhol to the Trio premiere, claiming that Warhol's static films were directly inspired by the performance.[45][46] In 1963 Young had joined Warhol's musical group The Druds, a short-lived avant-garde noise music band, but, finding it ridiculous, quit after the second rehearsal.[47][48] In 1964 Young provided a loud minimalist drone soundtrack to Warhol's static films Kiss, Eat, Haircut, and Sleep when shown as small TV-sized projections at the entrance lobby to the third New York Film Festival held at Lincoln Center.[49]
Lou Reed's 1975 album Metal Machine Music notes, "Drone cognizance and harmonic possibilities vis a vis Lamont (sic) Young's Dream Music"[50] among its "Specifications".
The album Dreamweapon: An Evening of Contemporary Sitar Music by the band Spacemen 3 is influenced by La Monte Young's concept of Dream Music, evidenced by their inclusion of his notes on the jacket. In 2018, Sonic Boom of Spacemen 3, along with Etienne Jaumet of Zombie Zombie and Indian dhrupad singer Céline Wadier, released Infinite Music: A Tribute to La Monte Young.[51]
According to Seth Colter Walls, writing in The Guardian, while Young has released very little recorded material, with much of it currently out of print, he has had an "outsized influence on other artists."[52]
Drone rock musician Dylan Carlson has described Young's work as being a major influence.[53]
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